This is very good; totally different, potentially difficult but beautifully written and so easy to read.
Set in late 17th century Amsterdam, an impoverished (following the death of her father) girl from a middle class rural bourgeois family is married into the mercantile wealth of Amsterdam. Arriving in the rather strange household, she is bewildered by her husband’s lack of interest in her and intrigued by his gift of a miniature and very exact replica of their house.
Events become bizarre; she follows her husband to work and finds him being fellated by a young man; her sister in law and the servants behave increasingly oddly, and additional miniature models with predictive powers over real events appear.
The husband is eventually executed for sodomy by the authorities, the sister dies in childbirth having produced a son by the black servant of the house, and our heroine never tracks down the miniaturist.
It all ends inconclusively and so slightly unsatisfactorily (could be left open for a sequel?) but it is a cracking good read and first novel.
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